Wee have been struggling to allocate a budget in the past few months and due to this we are looking for a potential antivirus solution ( the whole school is currenty using Windows Defender on WIN10) which is not really safe. We tried to get in touch with Avast,F-Secure or Bitdefender and few more but none of these had free of charge AV solutions.

Does anyone of you know a solution that offers free of charge for K-12 schools?

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Unless you find something maybe open sourced, you probably won't find free, but reduced cost. A/V is really not something to not invest in. I realize you probably already know this, but I had to say it anyway.

Unless you find something maybe open sourced, you probably won't find free, but reduced cost. A/V is really not something to not invest in. I realize you probably already know this, but I had to say it anyway.

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The organization I work for, which is is edu while not an educational facility, was directed to de-Kasperskyfy when all of that was in the news. To comply with that order we began the transition to Defender and SCCM for central reporting and removing Kaspersky. I saw an instance where two laptops one with Defender and one that had yet to be brought in and was still using Kaspersky got the same malicious email that both user's clicked. The machine running Defender caught, stopped, and reported the incidient. The laptop running kaspersky was free to try and roam, the reason I knew about it being infected was due the the blocks and protections in place with Umbrella stopping the domains, as well as alerts built into watching powershell event logs for suspicious activity.

Based on this incident alone, I felt Defender has come a long way from the viewpoint that it is the same as having nothing that has been long held. The reliance on having SCCM for central reporting leaves a bit to be desired though.

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In my previous job as a teacher at a public high school in Massachusetts... I learned...

a. Must protect the kids from all the bad things on the Internet to keep getting federal funds.... much in education is funded by this.

b. Must prove it.

c. Anything worse than PG-13 is considered bad. Probably PG for younger ages.

I would recommend that you or your IT check with other districts to see what they use, where they get it and if there is a resource for it at the state or county level.

The district I worked in used something that had a name that began with "star" I think. I had never seen it before or after. It did a pretty good job of catching things, especially on USB drives. It being 2009 - 2012, you know.

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Have you looked at some of the A/V solutions on Tech Soup? I know that money is extremely tight in the K-12 schools but Tech Soup gives Enterprise products at substantially reduced rates. As another has mentioned you may also want to check out ClamAV.

EDIT: You may also want to check out Immunet used in conjuction with ClamAV. It appears as though you can install it on Win 7/8/10 systems as well as Server 2008R2/ 2012 / 2016. I believe that this is also free:

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We finally had to make the argument that it was as essential as our SIS (With CIPA) to have a good AV and to prevent data breaches more than the free AV's. Data Breaches can be very expensive (Even if you have insurance) and it is essential to for it for normal operation of the systems. Granted, not all administration cares about that, but we are also on the tail of a couple "incidents" where it could have been worse if we did not have a solution in place to report issues.

We had to purchase an AV Recently since the "Avast free for education" program ended. It sucks, but I think it is necessary to protect your devices as best as you can.

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Not sure why you are down on Defender if you want free you have the best there is for Windows 10. Look around there are many stories of how third party AV can make you less safe. I have been at my school for 5.5 years using unmanaged forefront on win7 and defender on win 10 and standard user accounts. No problems in all that time.

My last school paid for Symantec and due to a crappy old SIS every teacher was an admin on the computer. As you can imagine my experience was quite different.

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First off, CIPA is a set of guidelines that you make best and reasonable effort to comply with within the limitations of your skill set and budgetary constraints. Make your best effort to comply as well as you can.

I have used CLAM in the past and hope it is better now than it was. Had it scan a guys machine and it nuked the OS because it found several issue and removed the files...BUT...because of the way the infections set themselves up the machine would no longer boot. Cured the virus but killed the patient!

Defender is much better than it used to be. You can mitigate a lot of the shortcomings using GPO's and other setups like EXE whitelisting, no admin rights, and depending on the setup of your machines and requirements something like RebootRestore RX might help.

Another option is to start the migration to another platform such as Chrome devices. So far I have never heard of one getting a virus of any type. They are generally less expensive, faster, lighter and safer than Windows. They are many times easier to manage as well as long as you have the Console.

If you are using Windows, then Windows Defender is as good as any other and is free. In this context "as good" means that the anecdotal statements I have read and past comparison statistics seem to indicate that there is not that much difference between the AV products although depending on the malware some AVs don't detect and deal with them on the occasion someone carried out a test. Probably in a weeks time the results would be different.

With Clam AV https://www.clamav.net/ works for offline scanning (I think off line) but it probably is not the kind of scanner you want at the school for the students.

I use Windows Defender personally and the different AV comparisons I've read show it does just as well as other free AV products. Without a central server controlling it you can use a batch file with the lines

This will run and update and then a quick scan. If you change the switch you can do a full scan. You can then push it out on a schedule with PDQ deploy or create a batch file and scheduled task for each computer. We did this at my last place and it worked fine for 1,000 computers (Kaspersky had proven to take up too much scanning resources and they were too cheap to look for an enterprise solution.)

Thanks for the tag Christina! Trend Micro is a robust solution and has good pricing for education. It's not free, but I recommend taking a closer look. If you wanted to get more info, Jake (CCB) can help you find out costs. jake.jones@ccbtechnology.com

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K-12 admin here. Get them to invest in an A/V solution. I'm on Webroot currently, and it catches the BadThings. Web based console, light weight client. The school has the money, they just don't want to share it with you.

Also, for CIPA, make sure you have a decent content filter/firewall that can block the BadThings. Really good ones have the ability to do some A/V scanning as well. But I would not rely on it solely. These days, a multi-tier approach is needed.

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Going to give a +1 to Windows Defender here. It has improved vastly over the years and I have seen it first hand stop things that other AV's flat out missed. I'm also not referring to free AV's but paid solutions.

Keep in mind no AV is going to be 100% and the old saying of "You get what you pay for." kind of applies. Technically you have paid for Windows and Defender happens to come with Windows.

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Not sure why you are down on Defender if you want free you have the best there is for Windows 10...

This is true. It's popular to bash Micro$oft around here
(I've done a bit of it myself)
but they know their own OS and Defender is good. It's looks like the loser in the advertised 3rd party AV stats because Microsoft gives all of their definitions away for free; other companies can always advertise they have a higher recognition rate (MS definitions + their own).

Just like with other AV you need the right Group Policies in place but as far as actual protection goes I've found it to be as good or better than most (including paid).